Stillness
by Skip
Summary: Gambit-related, post-Antarctica. He finally loses it.


Author: Skip (or Genna)  
Date: Sept. 03  
Fandom: Xmen  
Summary: Sometime after Antarctica, Gambit's got some sort of murder-suicide thing going on, and his isolation gets the best of him  
Rating: PG/PG13  
Feedback: Of course, but flames just..suck.  
Disclaimer: the words are mine, but everything else is just borrowed ideas. 

**Stillness**

He had pulled the desk chair out into the middle of the room, about fifteen inches away from the foot of the bed, and a fair number of feet from any of the four walls and the door which he was facing. Directly behind him, three feet away, was an empty red, three-ring binder and a number of blank white sheets of paper dumped in a pile in front of the desk. The binder and papers used to occupy his chair. 

He shifted his position, tearing his gaze away from the small mess on the floor. His head was tilted to the side, his gaze focused on the round, brass knob of the door. There was a smudge of something dark on the top of it. Quietly, he sighed and bent his body forward, resting his upper body weight on his thighs. 

Aside from the papers on the floor and the out-of-place chair, the room was sparsely decorated and empty of personal belongings. He'd gotten rid of all the paintings, small sculptures, rare volumes of time-worn books, everything valuable or invaluable, a few weeks after he was allowed back in the house. It had taken almost that long to readjust and to put enough thoughts in order to concentrate on cleaning up. And now the room was spick-and-span. 

He let his eyes drift shut, and listened. He heard the muffled hum of music a floor and some rooms away. Bobby's, maybe. Who else would play music so loud indoors? He smelt nothing besides the faint odor of smoke. He hadn't stuck a cigarette in his mouth for sometime, long enough that most of the smell should be washed out of his clothes, but the scent clung to his hair, skin, inside his nostrils still. Probably just his imagination. 

Frowning a little – he thought it would be seen more as a pout – he opened his eyes and they focused in immediately to the same smudge on the doorknob. The room was dark, pitch black. The heavy shades of the windows were drawn, keeping out the late evening sunlight. No lamps were lit in his room, or in his bathroom, or in the hallway his door lead into. But he could see, just as well. It simply wasn't as colorful as it normally was. 

On a floor and in some rooms away, somebody turn the music off. Remy leaned back in his seat. 

His seat. He had moved it out of boredom. And he didn't like it pushed under the unused desk any more. This was different. This was better than sitting on the seat of the toilet or half-laying in the bed or staring out the window. 

All the same, though... 

It still did not feel okay. 

He felt ignored. Neglected, if you will, although he was not. He was an adult, had been for some time. It was no one's fault but his own. 

One arm slipped off his leg, dangled several inches above the carpet. His hand hit the metal leg of the chair. 

With a start, he shook those all-consuming thoughts out of his head. What he didn't have wasn't was he ought to be concentrating on. He should be concentrating on what he had been given, and how much it was beginning to suck now. 

A room. Free room and mostly free board. Some sort of job, something to do sometimes. Tolerance, at the most... 

Uh-oh, that head-case talk again! 

Remy shook his head and slumped lower, feeling sick and dizzy and miserable. Three fingertips brushed the fuzzy carpet, enjoying the sensation. He peeked out from beneath his hair, looking at his bedspread, not-so-neatly tucked beneath the mattress. He realized, with an unsurprised sort of shock, that he could not recall the last time he fell asleep, much less where. Had that bedspread been disturbed since he'd first tucked it in? 

He scootched over in his chair, reaching out with his other hand to touch the bedspread, his right hand rising off the floor and resting on the edge of his chair. 

This was getting to him, he decided. The feeling awful, the nothing pieces he'd carefully cut his life into, the absolutely unchanging circumstances, no matter what. 

He felt a familiar, hushed spark flicker on within him, the feeling imitated a moment later at the tips of his fingers. The bedspread started to glow, that shifty pink glow that had always triggered a fight-or-flight response within him. He didn't move this time, though. It wouldn't take even a minute to charge this entire coverlet, and the bed itself, really. 

Might not feel all that great afterwards, but what the hey...? 

Caught up in the stupidity of the whole thing, he removed his hand from the simmering bed while, at the same time, concentrating on the chair, charging only a small section of it, the bac of the chair. 

He barely had the time to leap out of the way when it exploded, the detonation slamming him against the wall where – it was no longer in his hands, literally. 

_I give ya forty seconds,_ he thought privately, _before your whole world comes crashing down on ya,_ and stared at the wall, which was growing painfully hotter and hotter by the second. 

He heard the voices, breaking the silence, _Theifkillermurderertraitor,_ and tried not to laugh 

end. 


End file.
